As we have long come to expect in such cases, opinion is sharply divided into two camps. On the one side are the race hustlers with their incessant and at times ludicrous chants of racism, racism, racism, while on the other side there are those who say basically the victim deserved it, the police were only doing their always extremely difficult job. Heck, these guys are really angels.
Regardless of who killed Eric Garner, the question has yet to be asked, what killed him? Let us forget for this purpose the fact that he was black. What sort of man was he?
According to the three authors of New York Police Officer Won’t Face Criminal Charges In Eric Garner Death, published in The Wall Street Journal later the same year, he was a father of six, a grandfather, and had been arrested more than thirty times since 1980. He was born September 15, 1970, so clearly started young, and was quite likely a juvenile delinquent.
His arrest record included assault — which can be something as trivial as a shove; resisting arrest — which means anything the police want it to mean; grand larceny — which is definitely serious, ie theft of considerable value; and most tellingly, selling unlicensed cigarettes. It was this latter that led to his death. It should also be pointed out that Eric Garner was seriously overweight, and had a history of asthma. No one should be surprised when a man who fits that description is struck down at the age of 43, even without being held in a choke hold while resisting arrest.
Although no information is available, it is fair to say he was not a college graduate and perhaps not even a high school graduate. On the other hand, he was definitely not a career criminal, and was most definitely not a menace to society. Eric Garner was a member of the underclass, a group that is often erroneously identified by race by those who wilfully ignore the growing number of whites caught in the same downward spiral. So how did this come to be?
A hundred years ago, a man of Eric Garner’s limited talents could have eked out an existence pushing a broom. Many not only did but raised a family on one income. True, in real terms the standard of living for all working people was far lower than it is today; most homes did not have a telephone, there were no mobile phones, of course, nor television, and homes with no running hot water or no water at all were far from uncommon. The modern welfare state did not exist, and those who fell on hard times could have it very rough indeed. Best not talk about the difference in medical treatment. Would Eric Garner have lived to even 43 had he been born in 1870 rather than 1970?
All that being said, one thing that did not exist in those bad old days was the poverty trap. The colossal increase in the output of especially consumer goods, including food, has resulted in plunging prices, which is good news, but only for those who have money to spend. This output and the corresponding fall in prices is due to two things: advances in technology, and the accumulation of capital. The technological advances are nowhere greater than in the realm of computers. To give just one example, on February 10, 1927, a famous trans-Atlantic telephone call was made between the London office of music publisher Lawrence Wright and the New York office of lyricist Edgar Leslie. It lasted around half an hour and cost nearly £150. That was around a year’s salary in the UK at the time. Today, most of us think nothing about “hanging out” with people on the other side of the world for hours at a time.
While increases in other sectors have not been so spectacular, we are still faced with the “problem” of distributing this massively increased output. Generally we use the financial system to do this: workers are paid money which they spend on everything from rent and mortgages to food, clothes and holidays. But what happens when goods and services are produced in abundance by an increasingly smaller workforce, especially when many in that workforce have highly specialised skills? Augmenting the financial system is the tax system; the government takes money from the wealthy, from businesses, from highly paid workers, and redistributes it to those unable to find paid employment. That in addition to paying for emergency services, local administrations, public libraries and so on.
Adherents of socialism go much further, they seek to increase taxation on both the wealthy and corporations. Some, extreme socialists and communists, advocate confiscating corporations and businesses over a certain size if not everything, claiming this will not only increase output but deliver goods and services to everyone — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And how precisely is this to be achieved? As Leon Trotsky pointed out infamously, under socialism, he who does not work does not eat is replaced by he who does not obey does not eat. Would even Eric Garner have preferred to live under the tyranny of a monster like Trotsky than take his chances selling illegal cigarettes?
There is though a better way, basic income, the freedom dividend currently being advocated by Andrew Yang. Basic income paid unconditionally to every citizen out of newly created debt-free money would not only put more money in everyone’s pocket, it would, coupled with the abolition of minimum wage laws, destroy the poverty trap. This would mean most of those who are currently unemployable at market rates would be able to find low paid jobs to supplement their incomes.
Many objections are raised to this, usually pseudo-moral objections by academics, members of think tanks who are paid ludicrous salaries to churn out reams and reams of useless documents that no one ever reads. But the biggest apparently valid objection raised is you can’t simply print money, this will cause inflation. This completely ignores the fact that the banks do print money, electronically. The central banks including the Federal Reserve print it by quantitative easing. The commercial banks do it by lending money: every bank loan creates a deposit; every repayment destroys a deposit. Clearly, printing money per se is not the solution, otherwise every government on Earth could simply print money and give it to its citizens, which would result in their having enough to paper their walls but not enough to buy a loaf of bread. But we should not allow the common tactic of raising the spectre of hyper-inflation to frighten us into rejecting basic income. Without it we will see more pressure on the underclass to find paid work, work for which they are unsuitable, and more attempts to control them.
It should be noted that however much austerity any government requires its people to undergo, the one thing for which it can always find money is war. Ludicrous though it may sound, the conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression was “cured” by rearmament for the Second World War. During the war itself, men who had previously been languishing “on the dole”were put into uniform and sent abroad to kill and die, just like in the First World War. Some of these men were every bit as “unemployable” as Eric Garner. Although there was a shortage of consumer goods, no production of planes, ships, or ordnance was ever halted because the government ran out of money. No nation ever lost a war because it ran out of money. If the United States can afford war after foreign war, it can afford to pay all its citizens a basic income. And so can many other sovereign nations.
[The above article was first published on Medium, September 18, 2019].
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